Sunday, 12 May 2002 | Hamlet

We had only driven twenty miles or so before it felt like we were in another state. Down Hwy 1, past tiny churches with enormous electric signs, past Confederate graffiti, past old, well-kept wooden houses with fixed shutters, porches, and green, shaded lawns, through tightly strung downtowns, filled with brick sidewalks and buildings, built before architecture favored thriftiness.

On the way to Hamlet, our first stop, Todd drove, Martin sat in the passenger's seat in Todd's peanut debris, CD player on his knee, and I sat in the back, reading excerpts from books and papers out loud and passing CDs to the front. Whenever someone spotted something potentially worth photographing, we'd point it out, make a split-second decision, and Todd would pull over, maybe slowly driving backward down the breakdown lane or making a quick U-turn in the road.

We didn't see the chicken plant, though I was half-hoping we would. Our mission was to visit and photograph John Coltrane's birthplace, part interest-motivated, park work. Hamlet was run-down, the money long sucked out of it. But it was easy to imagine—looking at the shop windows, the train station, an abandoned gas station—how it used to be alive once, and quite pretty.

An old black barber with a white beard stepped out of his building, underneath the swirling white-red-and-blue signature pole. "If ya'll lookin for John Coltrane's, it's right there," he said, gesturing across the street. We must've been obvious. A young guy on a four-wheeler, riding through the heart of downtown, stopped and asked a few questions, and gave us information we needed, as well as some we didn't.

We walked along the tracks and peered in vacant store windows, shot out by BBs, whose roofs had been plunged in by time. An old man in a stiff baseball cap sat on the bank of the train tracks, chain smoking, next to a homemade aluminum ashtray filled with butts.

We continued onto Cheraw, South Carolina, to see where Dizzy Gillespie was born. There was a substantial seam marking the degredation of the road at the NC-SC border, and a fireworks shop just over the line. Cheraw was kept in better shape than Hamlet. Dizzy's house was no longer standing, and we could see little evidence that this was his hometown until we were let into a small museum crowded with tributes. It was getting late; after walking through the museum and visiting a graveyard, we got some dinner and turned around, making the 3-hour drive back. This time we were more subdued; no more leaps from the car to get pictures, and the music was almost inaudible. (See the pictures.)

Ten minutes after I got home, I left again, to take my cat Jane to the emergency room. Stuck in a waiting room with large stacks of People magazine and a moth beating its wings against the floor.